Amazon EKS pricing calculator
Compare Auto Mode vs EC2 Node Costs. Estimate your costs using AWS list prices.
Estimates from AWS list prices, not an AWS quote. Discounts, taxes and credit terms may affect your bill.
01 · How Amazon EKS pricing works
What you pay for
- Cluster fee: $0.10 per cluster-hour on standard support, $0.60 per cluster-hour on extended support (Kubernetes versions past 14 months).
- Optional Provisioned Control Plane tiers (XL and larger, priced per hour) for very large clusters.
- Compute: EC2 nodes (managed node groups, Karpenter), EKS Auto Mode (EC2 price plus a per-instance management fee), Fargate pods, Hybrid Nodes per vCPU-hour.
- EBS volumes, load balancers, NAT and cross-AZ traffic, CloudWatch observability.
Common cost traps
- Clusters left on old Kubernetes versions move to extended support automatically and the fee rises 6x to $0.60/hour.
- Every cluster costs about $73/month before any nodes; many small clusters add up.
- Cross-AZ pod-to-pod traffic and NAT for image pulls are common hidden costs.
- Auto Mode adds a management fee on top of the EC2 price for each node.
Ways to reduce cost
- Upgrade Kubernetes versions within standard support.
- Consolidate workloads into fewer clusters using namespaces.
- Use Karpenter or Auto Mode with Spot and Graviton; right-size requests so nodes pack well.
- Use VPC endpoints for ECR, S3 and CloudWatch to avoid NAT processing.
Free Tier & account eligibility
Free Tier depends on account age. Accounts created on or after 15 July 2025 get a $100 sign-up credit plus up to $100 more for completing onboarding activities; on the Free plan these last 6 months (or until used up), on the Paid plan unused Free Tier credits stay usable for 12 months from sign-up. Accounts created before 15 July 2025 keep the legacy Free Tier (12-month offers plus always-free offers). Always-free offers apply on both plans. No EKS Free Tier; the $0.10/hour cluster fee applies from the first hour on every plan. Nodes can use EC2 Free Tier eligibility (legacy) or Free Tier credits (new accounts).
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon EKS?
EKS cluster fees (standard and extended support), Provisioned Control Plane tiers, Auto Mode management fees, Hybrid Nodes and the EC2/Fargate/EBS capacity behind clusters are eligible usage and are offset by credits. General rules: credits only offset charges from the billing cycle in which they were applied onward (never past bills), they apply only to the services listed on the credit in Billing and Cost Management > Credits, they expire on the date shown there, and accounts on the AWS Free plan cannot receive Activate credits until they upgrade to the Paid plan.
Check my creditsExcluded charges & conditions
- Upfront payments for Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (All Upfront, and the upfront part of Partial Upfront). The recurring hourly fee of a No Upfront commitment is billed as normal usage and can be offset.
- AWS Marketplace charges (Activate credits make an exception for third-party foundation models used through Amazon Bedrock).
- AWS Enterprise Support, Enterprise On-Ramp, Unified Operations, resold support and partner-led support.
- Amazon Route 53 domain name registration and transfer fees.
- Taxes (sales, use, VAT and similar), AWS Professional Services, Training and Certification, Mechanical Turk, AWS Managed Services, and any use for cryptocurrency mining.
Illustrative credit runway
Single-service examples from the supplied data, not your calculator result. Months = credit amount ÷ monthly cost, before credit expiry. Credits can expire before these theoretical months are used; coverage and other AWS services can shorten runway.
| Usage profile | Monthly estimate | $10,000 | $25,000 | $100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | $151.38 | 66.1 mo. | 165.1 mo. | 660.6 mo. |
| Medium | $664.50 | 15.0 mo. | 37.6 mo. | 150.5 mo. |
| Large | $4,398.08 | 2.3 mo. | 5.7 mo. | 22.7 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
1 cluster (standard support), 3 x t4g.medium nodes 24/7, 20 GB gp3 each | EKS cluster: 730 cluster-hours x $0.1 = $73.00; EC2 t4g.medium: 2,190 instance-hours x $0.0336 = $73.58; gp3 storage: 60 GB-month x $0.08 = $4.80 | Total ~$151.38/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
2 clusters, EKS Auto Mode with 6 x m7i.large 24/7 (EC2 + Auto Mode fee), 50 GB gp3 each | EKS clusters: 1,460 cluster-hours x $0.1 = $146.00; EC2 m7i.large: 4,380 instance-hours x $0.1008 = $441.50; Auto Mode fee m7i.large: 4,380 instance-hours x $0.0121 = $53.00; gp3 storage: 300 GB-month x $0.08 = $24.00 | Total ~$664.50/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
3 clusters (1 on extended support), 30 x m7g.xlarge nodes 24/7, 100 GB gp3 each | EKS clusters (standard): 1,460 cluster-hours x $0.1 = $146.00; EKS cluster (extended support): 730 cluster-hours x $0.6 = $438.00; EC2 m7g.xlarge: 21,900 instance-hours x $0.1632 = $3,574.08; gp3 storage: 3,000 GB-month x $0.08 = $240.00 | Total ~$4,398.08/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon EKS pricing FAQ
What does an EKS cluster cost before nodes?
$0.10 per hour (about $73 per month) on standard support, or $0.60 per hour on extended support.
What is EKS Auto Mode?
AWS manages node provisioning, scaling and upgrades for you. You pay the EC2 instance price plus a per-instance Auto Mode management fee.
How do I avoid the extended support fee?
Upgrade each cluster to a Kubernetes version in standard support before its 14-month window ends.
Do credits cover EKS?
Yes. The cluster fee, Auto Mode fees and underlying compute are eligible usage.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.